July 2, 2020 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Your Best Day
July 2, 2020 at 7:43 am
I was consulting one of Dell's customers a few years ago which had trouble with SQL Server Performance on ESX Hosts.
Took me 3 days to capture some metrics to be able to determine that the SQL Server VM wasn't passing any Disk Queue Depth to the SAN Array.
I wrote a short summary for the customer how the issue looks like. Same day I got an invite for a conf call.
During that call I explained in detail what was happening and that from a SQL Server perspective I'm unable to fix this, eventually some drivers or ESX settings change might solve their issue.
When I was done telling my side of the story, the CIO got furious, really furious.
He said "How can it be that you couldn't tell me earlier what's wrong? We're dealing with this for a year(!) now, have been checking hardware and ESX for ages but it takes the SQL guy to take a look at the OS level?"
It wasn't pointed towards me but I still felt bad for them so I replied "I'm sorry, you didn't reach out for me earlier …"
July 2, 2020 at 12:03 pm
It seems that it is much easier to identify worst days than best days. I guess that is because they stand out more in our memory.
But thinking back, I realize my best days are not so much as fixing a problem, but applying some new knowledge. One that I would consider the second best day would be when I implemented partitioning in a data warehouse. I was suddenly able to easily archive old data and keep performance in a reasonable range. All without taking hours over a weekend to copy data. I couldn't wait to implement on another data warehouse. That is, until I discovered that someone bought SQL Server 2014 Standard edition to save money.
That leads me to my best day. I changed jobs and no longer had to support systems 24/7!
Scott
July 2, 2020 at 2:31 pm
One of the best days I ever had was when we released a billing data app on the web. First, some background.
Early on at my previous job, we'd written a desktop app in VB5 (the hot programming language at the time). It served two purposes. It allowed our in-house staff to enter new clients, create treatment plans, refer to providers for treatment, etc. The second purpose was for those providers to admit clients into their program and enter their billing data. That required driving around the city, installing the app on their desktops, etc. That just became too much of a burden. So, I proposed rewriting the client admission and billing pieces into a web app. The proposal was accepted and I led the rewrite. We delivered that some 6 months later. WOW, what a fantastic relief!!! Great savings on time, customers were happy. It was a win-win. 🙂
Rod
July 2, 2020 at 2:32 pm
One of my best days was last year. We were moving one of our systems from an in-house developed application that I was primary support for to a vendor cloud application. I'm not typically a user of this system, but my boss was going to be on vacation during part of the UAT so he asked me to cover testing for him. I had a lot of fun "yelling" at the business user when the system wasn't working as expected. I managed to get 3 years of payback into 2 days of testing. I highly recommend the experience.
July 2, 2020 at 4:14 pm
So, I proposed rewriting the client admission and billing pieces into a web app. The proposal was accepted and I led the rewrite. We delivered that some 6 months later. WOW, what a fantastic relief!!! Great savings on time, customers were happy. It was a win-win. 🙂
Quite an accomplishment in that time.
July 2, 2020 at 5:35 pm
My best days as a DBA have always been times when I have shined in somebody else's crisis. Two in particular come to mind.
Sometime around 2004 I had an internal customer group of highly skilled engineers who didn't feel the need for DBA looking over their shoulder. Over Memorial Day weekend they were transporting a combined application / database server on the opposite side of the US for installation in our DR datacenter (it got it's own seat on the plane). Per corporate policy I had installed SQL to our standards, but they were determined to handle everything after that. On Sunday evening I got a phone call from their team lead saying they had been trying for over 12 hours to get their application to connect to the restored database without success. After logging in I had them fixed in five minutes by relinking their SQL logins to the users in the database. From that point on they were some of my biggest fans.
A few years later I was on vacation, sitting on a beach in Mexico, when I got a phone call. Our on call DBA had an urgent support ticket for one of my other internal customers that they didn't know how to handle. I was able to talk them through it step by step while sitting on that beach sipping a beverage from a coconut. As a bonus I texted them pictures of my new "office" after the call was done.
July 3, 2020 at 12:12 am
Doctor Who 2 wrote:So, I proposed rewriting the client admission and billing pieces into a web app. The proposal was accepted and I led the rewrite. We delivered that some 6 months later. WOW, what a fantastic relief!!! Great savings on time, customers were happy. It was a win-win. 🙂
Quite an accomplishment in that time.
Thank you. I'll add that at that time there were 4 developers and since the web app had just two major functions it was a smaller task to bring up. It was a great team. 🙂
Rod
July 3, 2020 at 9:02 am
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July 4, 2020 at 3:24 pm
Heh... getting a little older and being prone to affib has changed what I call my "best day". My "best day" is always TODAY. It means that I woke up on this side of the dirt and, having lost several friends both online and off and both my parents, I have to tell you that any day you wake up has just become your best day.
There are a lot of successes you can have and some problems you can have every day. I'm not saying that you shouldn't celebrate your successes nor ignore your problems but... you can stress a whole lot less if you understand that everyday you wake up is actually your best day.
p.s. On the affib thing... with the help of a good doctor and a hell of a lot of research on my part (it turns out that most cardiologists miss a couple of very important factors for controlling and even eliminating affib) , I've come up with a "personal formula" for beating affib and it's actually pretty damned simple. Also and to be sure, I've had a lot of tests done to make sure that I don't have any other problems with my heart or cardiovascular system in general.
With all of that, I can now go months without any sign of affib and so the "best day" (today) has gotten a whole lot better.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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